Abstract
The present research examined mother-child discrepancies in reports of the children’s close relationships, as well as whether the discrepancies reported relate to the children’s well-being. Participants were 337 mother-child pairs (the children were in elementary school grades 2-6 ; 47% were girls). The children and their mothers reported on the content of the children’s close relationships, using the Picture Affective Relationships Test. The children also completed the Kid-KINDLR Quality of Life Questionnaire, which measures children’s well-being. The findings indicated that (a) although both the mothers and the children nominated many different kinds of significant others, the mothers reported more kinds than the children did; (b) the mothers nominated “the mother figure” more often and rated that as more important than the children did, especially in core psychological functions; (c) when affective types were identified in terms of the most dominant figure, 58% of the mothers reported their child as being a “mother” type, whereas 24% of the children did; and (d) the reported mother-child discrepancies were inversely related to the children’s quality of life (QOL) scores. The meaning of mother-child discrepancies was discussed.
